We simply have to allow them to return home, or else they will resume their jihad, see? And once at home, what will they do? Why, resume their jihad, of course. Why is there virtually no one with common sense and courage among the leaders of Europe?
“French jihadis will launch new wave of attacks unless they are allowed to return home from Syria says anti-terror magistrate,” by Emily Webber, Mailonline, October 20, 2019:
French jihadis should be allowed to return home to prevent a new wave of attacks, an anti-terror magistrate has warned.
David De Pas, French anti-terrorist judge, said ‘knowing that these people are in the care of the judiciary’ rather that allowing them to ‘roam free’ would be better for public safety.
Turkey’s offensive against Kurdish militia in northeast Syria has sparked fears that some of the 12,000 jihadists, including thousands of foreigners, being held in Syrian Kurdish prisons could escape.
Between 60 and 70 French fighters are among those held with around 200 adults, including jihadists’ wives, being held in total, along with some 300 children, according to Paris officials.
France has so far refused to allow adults to return home in order to make them face local justice with only a few children, mostly orphans, taken back.
Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian travelled to Iraq this week to convince Baghdad to take in and try French jihadists being held in northern Syria.
However De Pas argued that instability in the region and the ‘porous nature’ of the Syrian Kurdish prison camps risked triggering ‘uncontrolled migration of jihadists to Europe, with the risk of attacks by very ideological people’.
The Turkish offensive, which has detracted the Kurds’ attention from fighting IS, could also facilitate the ‘re-emergence of battle-hardened, determined terrorist groups.’
This in turn could spur the establishment of new jihadist networks to supply ‘French citizens drawn to these groups,’ he argued.
Warning of the risk of ‘a new vicious circle’ of radicalised young French people travelling to Syria, De Pas called on the government to demonstrate ‘the political will to repatriate’ the fighters.
Last month, IS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi urged the group’s followers to break jihadists and their family members out of prisons in Iraq and Syria….